Open data landscape: A global perspective and a focus on China

Abstract

Governments are producing significant public data that, if made open, is expected to create enormous social and commercial value as well as improve the civil governance. Unleashing the true power of open public data requires a much better understanding of its ecosystem than is known currently. This paper surveys the global open data landscape by taking into account the Open Data Barometer (ODB) ranking system and its three sub-indexes - readiness, implementation and impact. These indexes are compared and analyzed on the basis of income levels of the ODB ranked countries. Finally, using air quality open data, data availability in developing countries like China is compared with countries of better practices such as UK and US. The comparison helps in understanding the current situation and barriers in opening data in China.